The joys, trials and tribulations of farming in southern Saskatchewan.

The end of harvest may bring a huge sigh of relief, but it doesn’t mean that the work is over. When harvest is completed at the end of October, there isn’t the same excitement that comes with finishing a few weeks earlier. Why? Well, because there is the sudden realization that winter is only a very short time away.

The beginning of winter on the Prairies is inherently unpredictable. Sometimes it starts in December, sometimes in mid-October. When you reach the end of October to early November, the weather can turn very quickly. You can go from 10 degree days of sun to -10 degree days of blizzard in only a day or two. So, the long hours can’t stop; there is still much to be done.

Fields need to be prepped for spring seeding, some post-harvest spraying needs to be finished up (and the sprayer needs to be put away), combines need to be cleaned up and put away, and there are hundreds of thousands of bushels of grain to sell, move, and monitor.

So what do farmers do after harvest? Here is a short list:

1)Fieldwork: It’s a never-ending job. Even as we were combining, we had a tractor running down stubble with our Salford. The Salford RTS is an interesting tool that we bought a few years ago now, with wavy coulters on its main frame and harrows at the back. It is designed to tear through a field at 10+ miles per hour, hurling clumps of dirt and stubble up from the coulters, and smoothing them out with the harrows. It does a fantastic job of smoothing out small ruts, knocking down moderate-sized weeds, and incorporating stubble into the soil to aid in breaking it down. Heavy wheat stubble, like we have this year, is very difficult to seed through, especially with our SeedMaster air drill. The straw builds up on the shanks, causing plugging issues and leaving a messy finish to the field.

Although we consider ourselves to be a minimum to no-till farm, sometimes a little bit of tillage is necessary. If we can’t do a quality job of planting our crops because our fields are too thick with stubble, then we really don’t have much of a choice but to till it up. The Salford works great for this because it really isn’t tillage in the conventional sense; the coulters are vertical disks, rather than the angled ones that you typically see. This is referred to as “vertical tillage”, which allegedly helps fracture the soil to reduce compaction. While that is a debatable point, the Salford is still nonetheless a low-disturbance tool that still leaves lots of stubble standing behind it. It’s a great compromise.

However, despite its advantages, there are many things that the Salford simply cannot do. For those jobs, the tandem disk is still a vital tool for our farm. Cleaning up sloughs and flooded out low spots requires angled blades that can cut through old cat-tails (big, tall, nasty weeds) and bury the deep ruts. The disk is not a fun tool to run. It has dozens of bearings that never take grease and constantly fail, it’s a slow machine to run, and the rear blades constantly plug up in any sort of wet soil conditions. While it is a necessary tool, it’s one we use minimally.

2) Spraying: Even though October may seem very late to be spraying, we actually sprayed right up until the 23rd. We had such nice weather in late October that spraying was quite effective. At that time of the year, we are basically controlling weeds for next spring. I was spraying residual-type products on our winter wheat that will remain active on weeds until next May, which will really help the wheat get a jump on the weeds. The best defence against weeds is a competitive crop, after all.

3) Equipment clean-up: The most miserable job of all of harvest comes after it is completed. By that time, the combines are dirty and muddy, covered in chaff from multiple different crops, with cabs that have seen nearly 300 hours of threshing time. The combines need to be cleaned, and cleaned well. Every belt, bearing and chain must be checked during the winter to ensure the machines are ready for next harvest, and to do that properly, they really need to be clean.

We rented an industrial air compressor to clean our combines this year. With a gas-powered engine, a 3/4 inch line and a steel end, cleaning combines can progress much faster. No matter how you do it though, it is still a nasty job. You need to be prepared to breathe in a lot of dust, dirt, and a myriad of bacteria and fungi that grow on the built-up chaff. It’s a dirty, itchy, tiring and rather thankless job. And, not only do the combines need to be clean, the other machines do too. We try to wash and blow off other equipment, like the sprayer and our tractors, but sometimes the weather shuts us down before we can get all that done.

4) Marketing: In a year like this one, with a harvest plagued by rains and humidity, selling our cereals will not be a fun or easy task. Bleached, diseased, ugly looking kernels have filled our bins and bags, and, for the most part, they simply don’t meet the specifications required for good grades. So, we have taken dozens of samples of our wheat and durum to elevators, independent inspectors and the Canadian Grain Commission to try and get an idea of what we have in the bins and bags. Having good relationships with our buyers is an important asset this year, as some ugly stuff can be blended to improve its grade. Sometimes, that can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars!

Even when all those jobs are done (except for marketing- that job is never done), there is still much more to do. Until the ground is frozen solid (which may be next week from the look of the forecast), we will continue disking, running the Salford, burning flax straw (and that may continue even after freeze-up), and, of course, the never-ending job of hauling grain.

No, even when harvest is finally over, all you can give yourself is a moment of satisfaction and relief, because the work is far from over. I guess if you really look at it, we are already preparing for the 2015 seeding season. While it is many months away, it is already a pressing consideration in all of our minds as we transition to winter. The next crop year will come all too quickly- but a little, tiny part of me is already looking forward to it.